can PHP be used for this?

[Anon]

I have not done any programming in PHP but people have suggested that it would be a good tool for an application i'm working on.

Can PHP take in a web page, such as the search results from Google, and process the content? If so, can you suggest where I should start to look for information related to this(API's, documentation...)?

Thanks

[cordex]

Short answer, yes. Long answer, yes, rtfm.

You'd probably want to start with www.php.net and www.phpbuilder.com (which you've already found). There are other tutorials elsewhere but the best learning experience is just start small and make lots of mistakes.

hint:
fopen()

[Anon]

PHP, operating (as it does) on a web server, can certainly issue a request to another web site (e.g. Google) and retrieve, then analyze, the output (the HTML) that this web site produces.

I have, for example, created a web-page that polls our POP-server (e-mail) to list the mail that is queued, then delete the junk mail that we do not want to see.

For you, the first step should be to very carefully define what your goal is. Assuming that you cannot achieve what you're looking for by creating more-precisely-defined Google queries, you'll need to frame your goal in terms of something that can be programmed. Once you've defined something that "can be done automatically, by a blind stupid computer," then you can certainly create that using PHP (or Perl).